


a symptotic curve

by dharmavati



Category: Toki o Kakeru Shoujo | The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Genre: Apocalypse, Canon - Japanese, Chromatic Character, Chromatic Source, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Future Fic, Japanese Character, Romance, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-16
Updated: 2010-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dharmavati/pseuds/dharmavati
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Makoto didn’t believe in luck anymore, but she still thrived.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a symptotic curve

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gemkazoni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gemkazoni/gifts).



> Many thanks to sexybee for being a lovely beta reader.

 1.

Makoto didn’t believe in luck anymore, but she still thrived. Looking back, she’d had one really horrible day in her life, but she preferred to focus on the future instead. Sure, things wouldn’t always go her way, but she knew what she needed to do, and she held onto that thought like a talisman.

She scored decent grades in the Arts track, guarded her pudding cups with a righteous territoriality, and held her own in a karaoke box with Kaho and Yuri. Makoto visited the museum regularly and her Aunt Majo was probably the one person even prouder than her parents when Makoto enrolled in the art history course at the university.

She knew it wasn't not just a matter of good fortune when, in a span of four years, she ran across two different people with numbered tattoos: a bespectacled old man sitting next to her on the subway and a young woman wearing a pair of loud vintage bellbottoms. Neither of them spoke Japanese fluently or recognized the name “Mamiya Chiaki”, but Makoto remained upbeat that there will be other chances. These days, she believed in destiny and it hadn’t let her down yet.

 

2.

The prospect of restoration suited Chiaki more than he had expected. Perhaps it was because most of his more obnoxious batch mates had already evacuated from the archipelago, and he was happy being surrounded by a fairly pleasant crowd. At the end of the day, they all could come back to the Central quarters to complain about the constant dust storms and swap recipes to bring proper flavor to the biodome’s bland, hydroponic rations. They merged into a family as the wrecked city became their shared home.

He found it cathartic to start digging again the old-fashioned way, with his hands and a sturdy shovel. He did not tell the others about searching for the painting, but some of them tagged along just to help with the overhaul. It ended being somewhat fun. One day, he and Isamu managed to stumble across an intact computer, ancient but still capable of functioning, in a sunken heap of debris. They gleefully transported it back to Central and fiddled with the wiring so that Chiaki could introduce everyone to some classic video games. He laughed when several of them came back to him days later, complaining of dreams full of falling blocks.

He felt a lot less joyful a month later when the news broke from the mainland that the International Council voted to limit distribution of time leap chargers.

They deem it as an indefinite security measure. Too many people, a senator argued in the broadcast, were using the past to escape the problems of the present or to change history irrevocably, without doing anything useful to improve their present status.

He watched the broadcast halfheartedly while wading through the swamp of unread emails and redundant inoculation reminders. He had no idea where Makoto would have saved the painting, and, suddenly, it seemed like there was no way back to her and _that_ hurt him more than he could tell anyone.

 

3.

It was a beautiful weekend after a string of merciless final exams, perfect for a picnic at the park. Makoto stretched out on the grass alongside her classmate Tezuka Kaoru and sighed at the fluffy clouds.

Drawn to the flash of red, Kaoru turned to her and sat up. “Hey, Makoto, what's that on the back of your arm?”

“Huh?” Makoto paused, glanced at the near-forgotten zero mark by her elbow, and brushed it off self-consciously as she searched for an explanation. “Oh, you mean this? Uh, it’s just an in-joke between my school friends.”

Kaoru, however, widened her eyes as she came closer to see the tattoo better. “Makoto... is that what I think it is? You never said that you were a leaper as well!”

Straightening up, Makoto stared at her for several seconds before gaining the ability to respond. “H-How do you know about time travel?”

Kaoru jumped up. “Wow, why didn’t you let me know sooner? I thought _I_ was doing well for learning everything on my own, but you seem like a natural in this era!”

Makoto gasped, unable to believe her friend for over a year. “You made a time leap to come here? Really?”

“Of course,” Kaoru replied, taking off her watch to show a tattoo with the number “10” on her wrist. “I’m from 120 years post-Chrono, how about you?”

“I’m, well, from here,” Makoto said, not really understanding Kaoru’s question. “I’m from the present, but I came across one of those chargers a few years ago, and that’s how I got this.”

She launched into an explanation of her high school days when she found the charger as Kaoru listened, looking amazed.

“I can’t believe you met Mamiya Chiaki!” Kaoru exclaimed.

Makoto blinked as it was her turn to be floored again. “What? How do _you_ know him too?”

“Well, I’m actually here because of him. He sent me here to study all types of art restoration for him.” She laughed at Makoto’s boggled expression. “He’s an older person, not a teenager, in my time, if that makes any sense. He’s one of the few responsible for rebuilding Tokyo again.”

“Is that what he does in your time?”

“Yeah, I knew he’d made a few time leaps himself, because he has a great understanding of how everything here used to be pre-Chrono--that means _before_ the invention of time travel,” she explained. “He never said anything about spending time here before sending me. I think it’s kind of surprising to me because he tends to have the reputation of a loner.”

“Oh, I see,” Makoto said, not knowing what to think of Chiaki living and working alone in a broken city of the distant future that looked nothing like the Tokyo she knew and loved. It made her chest feel like it was frozen over. “He told me that he needed that painting in the future. Do you know anything about it in your own time?”

Kaoru shrugged apologetically. “He has uncovered a lot of artwork over the years, so I’m not really sure. I’d be happy to find out for you since I’m going to be helping him preserve them for my future, but it’s possible it might be too late if I go after the restoration has taken apart everything in the city.”

“So... is it not possible for you to send a message to him, somehow?”

"I should be able to," Kaoru began, "but I think I have a better idea in mind."  

 

4.

“Um, sorry, do I know you?” Chiaki asked the strange girl who had practically rolled into his office with an “Oof!” She beamed at him but shook her head as she dusted herself off.

“Sorry, not yet, anyway,” she replied. “I’ve come here from pre-Chrono as a favor to Makoto, though. She said she needed me to pass on a few messages.”

Chiaki had little time to pick his jaw up from the floor before she slipped something into his hand. He looked down to find a walnut-sized charger blinking in his palm.

“If I remember correctly, there is a restriction on these for the next twenty years or so?”

He nodded as he turned the charger over in his hands.

“Well, you gave me this extra one in the future, even though I said I didn’t need it, so I’m technically just giving it back to you.”

“Did you say you had a message for me from Makoto?”

“Yeah, I have two, in fact,” she replied. “Makoto and I were thinking about it, and we realized that you planned this out in the future, in _my_ time. We figured out the best way to save the painting Post-Chrono, and Makoto said that she found the best place for you to find it but I needed to reach you before the restoration project reaches that sector of Tokyo.”

Chiaki considered this slowly. “You mean it’s in a place I haven’t searched yet?”

Kaoru smiled. “That’s what we hope! Makoto told me to tell you that she’s going to bury the painting deep in the place you loved the most when you were in her time. She said that you’d understand. Oh, and she also asked me to give you this!”

She handed him an envelope with a wink before running out the door. He caught her disappearing at the top step.

He opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside to find a date, time, and place scrawled under Makoto’s handwriting:

 _Don’t forget your yukata._

He immediately broke into a huge smile in spite of himself and glanced at the clock. Calculating that there would be enough daylight to make it in time to the site of the old baseball field, he laid the charger and letter on his desk, grabbed his shovel, and hurried outside.

5.

A huge crowd had already started swarming by the riverside. Chiaki waited at the edge of the park with nothing to distract him from the familiar flutter in his stomach until he heard someone call out his name.

“Chiaki! You made it!”

“Makoto,” he whispered, as she peeked out of the throng and made her way towards him. He wouldn’t have mistaken her for anyone else, even though her hair was longer and she appeared taller in a bright, patterned yukata. He looked behind her and was more surprised to see Kousuke following her. He did not quite anticipate it when Kousuke walked up to him and playfully punched him on the shoulder.

“Ow!” His exclamation caused a few people in the crowd to turn around in curiosity as he rubbed his arm gingerly. Even in jest, Kousuke’s arm was as brutal as ever. “What was _that_ for?”

“Everything,” Kousuke laughed. “When Makoto said that you’d be in town, I didn’t believe her at first. You never said a proper goodbye, you jerk!”

Chiaki grinned back. “I’m sorry, Kousuke, I really should have, but it happened so suddenly back then.”

“It’s okay; we’ve long forgiven you by now,” Kousuke assured him. “It’s nice to see you back though. Are you staying in Japan for long?”

“No, unfortunately I’ll have to leave tomorrow. I’ll try to come back to visit more often in the future,” Chiaki replied as Makoto looked on, quite amused.

“You’d better,” Kousuke told him as he fished his buzzing cell phone from his pocket. “Oh, Kaho must be somewhere here by now. I’ll be back, okay?”

Chiaki waved at his receding back before turning to Makoto. “I found the painting!”

Makoto jumped in glee. “You did? Oh, I’m so glad! Kaoru and I wanted to make sure you found it before they tore apart the ground in that area. And I’m really glad you came here. You look pretty nice, for once.” She moved closer to examine the fabric of his yukata between her fingers.

“The shopkeeper was very patient with me trying on and buying it at the last minute,” he admitted. “But what is this all about, anyway? Why did you call me here to watch fireworks?”

“We all never got to do anything together during that summer, and I wanted to restart there again. Besides, you did say that you wanted to see me in a yukata,” Makoto replied, blushing fiercely.

“I did? I don’t remember that,” Chiaki admitted, fixedly scratching a possibly nonexistent itch on the back of his neck.

“Oh right, I had to rewind that bit to give you back your time leap,” Makoto mused. “But you meant what you said to Kousuke, didn’t you? You’ll be able to come back again, right?”

“Yes, thanks to you, I’m covered.” He pulled back his sleeve to show a “99” on his wrist.

“I think it’s more like thanks to Kaoru, your future self, and me for planning these things,” Makoto pointed out. “In any case, let’s go! The fireworks start soon, and I asked Yuri to save all of us a nice spot up front.”

“Uh... wait,” he mumbled. “I also wanted to say....”

He trailed off awkwardly, but Makoto closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around him. He dipped his head to kiss her until he felt slightly dizzy and they broke apart.

“Me too,” she replied. She intertwined her fingers in his, and together they walked down the path as rockets burst above their heads.


End file.
